NetFlix is the best invention of our era.
I know it’s not free, but I get the notion in my mind that it is. I’ll be thinking about some movie I want to see or some movie I saw when I was a child and I want to see again and I’ll think “Might as well get it from NetFlix since it’s FREE.”
This is what prompted me to put The Brave Little Toaster in my queue.
It was weird watching it for the first time in what I estimated to be 15 years. You start picking up on various inconsistencies and themes that children just don’t pick up on or understand. The movie was very obviously tailored with children in mind.
One thing I picked up on right away was the loosey-goosey way they handled the appliances’ movement. Lamp, Radio, Blanket, and Toaster weren’t hindered by needing a power source, but Kirby the vacuum cleaner had to be plugged in to move around. I’d think that of all of them, Kirby would be the one who needed power the least, as he was the only one who was built with wheels. And furthermore, he was shown moving about the house before they established he needed a power source with no cord shown at all.
And that’s another point. I understand that it would be a pain in the ass for animators, but why establish that the appliances have cords when they’re not ALWAYS going to have cords? The first time we see Toaster, he uses his cord to get down from the counter where he’s sitting. For the rest of the film, Toaster’s cord only shows up when it’s needed for use as a tether or something. This wouldn’t be so glaringly obvious if Lamp didn’t have an obvious lack of limbs and relied on his cord to be his arms. It just calls attention to the fact that none of the others have cords in most scenes.
Speaking of inconsistencies, Blanket caused a lot of problems for me in my mind. At times, he’s sort of shaped like a ghost, with his “head” in the middle with everything hanging down around him. That is not how electric blankets are constructed. The controls that would form his head are at the edge of the blanket. Again, this wouldn’t be such a big deal if Blanket’s head didn’t keep changing position on his body! Sometimes he’s a ghost, sometimes he’s a blanket again. Couple this with the fact that the blanket kept changing in size. In some scenes he’s a king-size comforter. In others he’s no bigger than a hand towel or a dust rag.
So far I’ve just been bitching about literal, concrete things, but The Brave Little Toaster is actually a pretty cool piece of literature, all things considered. A lot of the movie is pretty kid-friendly, aside from a few strange themes that kept cropping up that may be too disturbing or too complex for children to understand.
I’m sure these are better expressed in the novel that the film was based on, but sadly I’ve never read it, so I’ll just be using the film as a reference point.
One big thing in the film was the examination of purpose in life. One of the first things the appliances deal with in the film is what they’re carrying on for. The Master, their owner, allegedly moved away as a small child. I’m just estimating, but judging from the appliances’ recollections of his being in school and just the general character design, the Master was somewhere between the ages of 7-10 when he and his family moved away. Old enough to go to school and prepare toast for himself, but still young enough to make faces at himself in the reflection of the toaster. This means that nobody had set foot in the cabin where the appliances are living in the beginning of the film for going on eight years, as the Master is just preparing to go to college when we see him again toward the end.
The first scene in the movie is Radio waking everybody up, his alarm still set for six in the morning. Kirby is still fanatic about keeping the place tidy, as shown by his quick and almost brutal assault on a piece of dust that lands on the floor in the film’s opening moments. In their own way, each of the appliances is searching for his purpose without the presence of human beings. The Blanket seems worst off, his mental stability deteriorating to a point where he actually hallucinates the Master’s return. A character whose sole purpose was warmth and comfort has been left with a group of friends who, although very accepting and supportive, don’t necessarily need a blanket’s warmth.
In addition to Blanket, the appliances all seem to be in some way affected mentally. Radio suffers from delusions of grandeur, constantly blathering about his days as an adventurer and war hero, each word of it a fabrication. Lamp seems a bit dull in thought, as ironic as that is. Kirby, so stubborn and steadfast in his ways, asserts that hard work is the only way to get ahead in life, despite the fact that for eight years he’s been working with no real purpose or goal.
All that time cooped up together with no purpose has, in some ways, forced the appliances to suffer from mild, quite literal, cabin fever. Throughout the film, they’re constantly bickering or putting one another down when things get rough, and in some cases for no reason at all. In a scene where the appliances are stranded in the woods, each of the other appliances in turn shun Blanket as he seeks comfort through the night. It isn’t until he turns to Toaster that his desire for affection is met.
Lamp later addresses this to Toaster and they discuss, quite tellingly, how affection for each other mimics their affection for the Master. This raises the question: Do the appliances really need human interaction? When they set their differences aside and they stop worrying about their involvement with humans, they seem quite comfortable and quite happy.
This suggests that perhaps the purpose of life isn’t something that needs sought out.
The purpose of life may be so close to you, you can’t even see it.
Another concept that kept showing up, serving as a contrast to the purpose of life theme, was the idea of pain, death, and mortality.
Death was hidden behind a thin veil in the film. Becoming broken or thrown away was a metaphor for the appliances’ lives. One of the first scenes in the film is the air conditioner dying of what could possibly be equated to a stress-induced heart attack. In the aftermath, the appliances’ shock and grief is palpable.
The climax of the film involves Toaster, flinging himself into the gears of a trash masher in a junkyard, gumming up the works instants before the Master is crushed to death, hence the film’s title. Each of the appliances, though, has one point in which they are particularly heroic and risk everything for the aid of one of their friends.
At one point, Blanket is swept away by the wind in a storm. Lamp, desperate for more power to make himself brighter, is willingly struck by lightning. Of course, this fails, but it ends up helping in the long run, as the lightning recharges the group’s battery.
At one point, the appliances, sans Kirby, fall down a waterfall. Kirby then leaps off the cliff with the intent of saving his friends, with no regard for his own well being. As a result, he’s left without the battery and effectively cripples himself for a good portion of the film.
Perhaps the bravest moment of all was displayed by Blanket. In one scene, the appliances are lost in a swamp. Kirby, the heaviest, slips down the side of an embankment and lands in a pit of quicksand. The others, considerably smaller and lighter, do their best to pull him out of the mire, but slowly succumb to the force of the quicksand. One by one they’re pulled under. Just before he’s submerged, Blanket assures Toaster that he’s not scared, his voice trembling with fear and resolve.
In the face of death, a character ruled by his own fears and insecurities tells an outright lie to a friend, just to preserve that friend’s peace of mind. Blanket’s penultimate words display a less physical sense of heroism than that of his friends, but heroic nonetheless. He feigns resignation to his fate in order to make his friends’ last moments more peaceful. At that moment, when all seemed lost, that was all he could do, and somehow it was enough.
There’s a lot more to discuss, but this has already run on too long. Thinking about it, The Brave Little Toaster is a pretty important piece of literature in film. Under the guise of a children’s movie, the writers and director explore some of the deepest quandaries that people encounter in their lives. A lot can be learned from really paying attention to the subtle nuances that come together to make this film.
…
I’m just kidding.
It’s just a movie about a fucking toaster that can talk.
Jesus.
OR 
